2022 Workshop Organizers

  • Giovanni Da San Martino, University of Padova. dasan[at]math.unipd.it

  • Anna Feldman, Montclair State University. feldmana[at]montclair.edu

  • Chris Leberknight, Montclair State University. leberknightc[at]montclair.edu

  • Preslav Nakov, Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU. pnakov[at]hbku.edu.qa


Past Workshops

NLP4IF 2018

NLP4IF 2019

NLP4IF 2020

NLP4IF 2021


    Regular Papers
  • Submission Deadline Extended: August, 18, 2022 (23:59 PM Pacific Standard Time)
  • Notification of Acceptance: August 22, 2022
  • Camera-ready papers due: September 5, 2022
  • NLP4IF 2022 Workshop

    NLP4IF is dedicated to NLP methods that potentially contribute (either positively or negatively) to the free flow of information on the Internet, or to our understanding of the issues that arise in this area. We hope that our workshop will have a transformative impact on society by getting closer to achieving Internet freedom in countries where accessing and sharing of information are strictly controlled by censorship.

    The workshop is supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation, award No. #1828199

    The topics of interest include (but are not limited) to the following:

  • Censorship detection: detecting deleted or edited text; detecting blocked keywords/banned terms;
  • Censorship circumvention techniques: linguistically inspired countermeasure for Internet censorship such as keyword substitution, expanding coverage of existing banned terms, text paraphrasing, linguistic steganography, generating information morphs etc.;
  • Detection of self-censorship;
  • Identifying potentially censorable content;
  • Disinformation/Misinformation detection: fake news, fake accounts, rumor detection, etc.;
  • Identification of propaganda at document and fragment level
  • Identification of hate speech
  • (Comparative) analysis of the language of propagandistic and biased texts
  • Automatic generation of persuasive content
  • Automatic debiasing of news content
  • Tools to facilitate the flagging, either automatic or manual, of propaganda and bias in social media
  • Automatic detection of coordinated propaganda campaigns such as the use of social bots, botnets, and water armies
  • Analysis of diffusion and consumption of propagandistic, hyperpartisan, and extremely biased content in social networks
  • Techniques to empirically measure Internet censorship across communication platforms;
  • Investigations on covert linguistic communication and its limits;
  • Identity and private information detection;
  • Passive and targeted surveillance techniques;
  • Ethics in NLP;
  • “Walled gardens”, personalization and fragmentation of the online public space;
  • We hope that our workshop will have a transformative impact on society by getting closer to achieving Internet freedom in countries where accessing and sharing of information are strictly controlled by censorship.

    We accept submissions of short and long papers. See the guidelines here: https://coling2022.org/Submission

    Submission page: https://www.softconf.com/coling2022/NLP4IF/

    Schedule Detail

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    VENUE

    Co-located with COLING 2022 https://coling2022.org/ currently scheduled to be held in Gyeongju, Republic of Korea

    Important Dates (Regular Papers)

    Submission Deadline Extended: August 18, 2022 (23:59 PM Pacific Standard Time)

    Notification of Acceptance: August 22, 2022

    Camera-ready papers due: September 5, 2022

    NLP4IF Workshop co-located with COLING-2022, October 12-17, 2022

    Program

    According to a recent report produced by Freedom House (freedomhouse.org), an independent watchdog organization dedicated to the expansion of freedom and democracy around the world, political rights and civil liberties around the world deteriorated to their lowest point in more than a decade in 2017. Online manipulation and disinformation tactics played an important role in elections in at least 18 countries over the past year, including the United States (see Freedom House reports). Disinformation tactics contributed to a seventh consecutive year of overall decline in internet freedom, as did a rise in disruptions to mobile internet service and increases in physical and technical attacks on human rights defenders and independent media. A record number of governments have restricted mobile internet service for political or security reasons, often in areas populated by ethnic or religious minorities. The use of “fake news,” automated “bot” accounts, and other manipulation methods gained particular attention in the United States. While the country’s online environment remained generally free, it was troubled by a proliferation of fabricated news articles, divisive partisan vitriol, and aggressive harassment of many journalists, both during and after the presidential election campaign. Venezuela, the Philippines, and Turkey were among 30 countries where governments were found to employ armies of “opinion shapers” to spread government views, to drive particular agendas, and to counter government critics on social media. The number of governments attempting to control online discussions in this manner has risen each year since Freedom House began systematically tracking the phenomenon in 2009. Various barriers exist to prevent citizens of a large number of countries from accessing information in many countries around the world. Some involve infrastructural and economic barriers, others include violations of user rights such as surveillance, privacy and repercussions for online speech and activities such as imprisonment, extralegal harassment or cyberattacks. Yet another area is limits on content, which involves legal regulations on content, technical filtering and blocking websites, (self-)censorship. Large Internet service providers (ISPs) are effective monopolies, and have the power to use NLP techniques to control the information flow. Users have been suspended or banned, sometimes without human intervention, and with little opportunity for redress. Users reacted to this by using coded, oblique or metaphorical language, by taking steps to conceal their identity such as the use of multiple accounts, raising questions about who the real originating author of a post actually is.

    Submissions should be written in English and anonymized with regard to the authors and/or their institution (no author-identifying information on the title page nor anywhere in the paper), including referencing style as usual. Authors should also ensure that identifying meta-information is removed from files submitted for review.

    Dual submission policy:

    We accept submissions of short and long papers. See the guidelines here: https://coling2022.org/Submissions/

    Submission page: https://www.softconf.com/coling2022/NLP4IF/

    FAQ: virtual attendance, and LaTeX templates https://#

  • Giovanni Da San Martino, Senior Assistant Professor, University of Padova. dasan[at]math.unipd.it
  • Anna Feldman, Professor of Linguistics and Computer Science at Montclair State University. feldmana[at]montclair.edu
  • Chris Leberknight, Associate Professor of Computer Science at Montclair State University. leberknightc[at]montclair.edu
  • Preslav Nakov, Senior Scientist, Qatar Computing Researach Institute. pnakov[at]qf.org.qa
  • Tariq Alhindi, Columbia University (USA)
  • Alberto Barŕon-Cedeño, University of Bologna (Italy)
  • Jed Crandall, University of New Mexico, NM (USA)
  • Anjalie Field, Carnegie Mellon University, PA (USA)
  • Yiqing Hua, Cornell Tech (USA)
  • Jeffrey Knockell, The Citizen Lab, University of Toronto (Canada)
  • Henrique Lopes Cardoso, University of Porto (Portugal)
  • Hannah Rashkin, University of Washington (USA)